I’ve written it before, I’m writing it again. GNOME seems to have two faces. The one is Shell. In my opinion Shell easily out-beats by design every other desktop, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, Deepin, Win8, Unity, and I think only Mac OS X and elementaryOS can compare with it. Shell is smarter, is faster (you do things faster with it), it even looks better in many cases.

The second face is GNOME Apps. GNOME Apps can’t really follow Shell’s genius design, they can’t be hacked as easily as Shell, they can’t be extended (plugins?) as Shell does with extensions, they aren’t so attractive for contributors as Shell

Since version 3.10, GNOME started a very good effort to awesom-ize Apps and bring them into the same level as Shell is. This effort was mostly took place through GTK+ development, but we also had some serious changes in core modules as Videos and GEdit [3.12].

My guess is that this effort will have a continuation and we’ll get lots lots of changes in 3.14 concerning applications.

Are GNOME apps poor in capabilities compared to 3rd party respective ones? I think this isn’t a valid question. No matter what GNOME (or any other organization, MS, Apple, Google) will do, there will always be someone else out there that he/she/they will create something better. That’s open source world ;)

For me, GNOME gives a very adequate level of experience with their default applications for the majority of users. Maybe they even do better than they should. If you want something more, something extreme, GNOME gives us SoftwareApp to look for apps that fits our tastes.

So I am pretty much fine with what GNOME offers me as a user. What I am not fine with though, is the large widgets, the large spaces and in general the whole “XL approach” that all GNOME apps have.

I can’t find an explanation to justify the size of GNOME Apps components. What I can do is to scale down GNOME a bit and watch how things could be much much better!

Normal size 100%

Scaled | 95%

Screens won’t work. To try it, start some applications and open Looking Glass